Electronic systems and devices have made a significant contribution towards the advancement of modern society and have facilitated increased productivity and reduced costs in analyzing and communicating information in a variety of business, science, education, and entertainment applications. These electronic systems and devices are typically tested to ensure proper operation. While testing of the systems and devices has made significant advances, traditional approaches to debugging problems or issues that are discovered during the testing is somewhat more problematic.
Most devices under test (DUTs) typically have an external port that is made available on the DUT for communicating information used to analyze or debug operations within the device. In one example, the external port is part of a solid state device (SSD) that includes the ability to monitor activities within a device controller. A typical issue with conventional monitoring of traffic and transactions taking place inside the DUT for debug analysis is that they typically require the DUT to be connected to a discrete external instrument (e.g., external monitor). This usually means that the DUT has to be disconnected and removed from the testing environment and connected to an external wiring harness that communicates the information to the external instrument. Furthermore, during device bring-up in typical traditional approaches, only a single DUT can be debugged at a time. The user often has to disrupt or interrupt other testing activities to hook up an external monitor to the DUT to be able to debug the DUT.
As products have matured, there is a preference for testing to be performed on a high number of DUTs in parallel (e.g., 128 DUTs, etc.). A prolonged testing time associated with doing testing and monitoring on an individual DUT basis is undesirable. However, in typical conventional testing and debugging, if an issue arises (e.g., failure, error, etc.), then extra time and effort is expended removing the “problem” DUT from the testing environment and connecting the DUT individually to the external wiring harness and monitoring device to analyze or debug the issues. Therefore, conventional testing approaches are often a major obstacle to throughput. Furthermore, in traditional testing approaches, the connection of the DUT to external wiring typically prevents it from being tested while being located in a temperature chamber used for testing. Stopping and removing the DUT from the testing environment means additional time and effort is usually needed to attempt to re-create the conditions of the failure in order to diagnose it. This additional time and effort in attempting to re-create the problem can be significant and sometimes the precise conditions can not be reliably recreated. In addition, the conventional external wiring for debug operations often results in a web of wires that impede testing because each DUT typically needs to be connected to the dedicated external monitor using a separate wire.